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Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

terraformindustries.wordpress.com

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Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#231

Post by Plasmoid »

DarmokJalad1701 wrote: post #118
abdullahkhalids wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only way a technology like this will help get us to carbon zero is using it in places where there is not much hope of replacing electricity. While small elective airplanes have been demonstrated, it doesn't seem like we will be able to build, in the next couple of decades, large electric airplanes that can substantially replace current fuel powered ones. This would require the additional step of converting methan…

You could theoretically run jet engines on directly on methane (liquid or not) - though I am not sure how much work would be required to refit an existing one for this purpose. Methane is already used for running the turbo-pumps in rocket engines like SpaceX's Raptor or Relativity's Aeon-R.

You'd be talking about liquid methane to get the energy density you want. Handling a cryofuel would be quite hard and you'd be redesigning everything to ensure it kept working.

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#232

Post by cbsmith »

joe_the_user wrote: post #29
carbonguy wrote: post #15

As a "carbon industry" observer, this is pretty exciting news. I've had my eye on Terraform Industries for a while and love what they're doing; they're one of the few groups that actually seem to understand the implications of what it will take to shift to a carbon-neutral economy, and their core insight about the economics of atmospheric fuel synthesis is one of those "obvious when you hear it" ideas: solar electric…

It looks good. I wish their headline was "natural gas from solar power" 'cause many things labeled "carbon neutral" wind-up being conventional petrochemicals plus some worthless "offsets" baloney.

That's basically what this is, minus the "worthless" part. That's the part you'd have to read past the headline to be sure of anyway.

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#233

Post by cbsmith »

pydry wrote: post #140
mschuster91 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You could also technically use this as a grid-battery, taking in excess grid energy when it is cheap and converting it into natural gas that can be run back through a gas peaking plant that spins up to meet peak demand. The loss in such a cycle is abysmal, alone from thermal loss (not to mention the loss during compression and decompression) - even straight fuel cells are at 60% round-trip, compared to batteries wi…

Batteries are good at smoothing out daily or even weekly variations but do not make any sense whatsoever for seasonal power storage. It's ridiculously cost ineffective to charge a battery in July only to discharge it in December. 60% roundtrip is cost effective if you're synthesizing when the sun is blazing and the wind is blowing hard and burning it when wind, solar and batteries have all tapped out. Thats especiall…

Is that more effective than the traditional, "store the energy as kinetic potential energy by pushing water uphill, so you can let it go down the hill later" approach.

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#234

Post by lrem »

julienchastang wrote: post #104

Their minimalist website is awesome: https://terraformindustries.com/ complete with plain text chemical equations. "Why does our website look like this? At TI we believe we can change the world by displacing fossil hydrocarbon production at global scale. Like our website, our machines are simple so we can build millions of them as quickly as possible. Our website embodies our cultural commitment to allocating resourc…

This is basically https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

But you know what, http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/

They already have a style element in there. The whole thing becomes readable by just adding a width property. Much better when centered. Done.

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#236

Post by cbsmith »

toddmorey wrote: post #210
NortySpock wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but the point is, once this costs nearly-the-same as methane extracted from the ground, it's not worth it to pull methane out of the ground! We'd stop having an incentive to add more CO2 to the atmosphere! We'd be able to get to net-zero carbon / methane emissions without having to substantially change our living conditions. Cities or states would "just" bottle up some liquid methane for the winter months (or…

Yes but the issue is we almost always encounter & have to remove lots of natural underground methane to get to the oil below it. If the oil drills lose incentive to sell the methane off, they just burn it on site as waste. Horrible I know. So synthetic methane also needs to reduce crude oil demand I’m thinking.

I don't think it does, though that would be great. Burning the methane on site as waste is still significantly better than releasing it into the air (converting methane to mostly CO2 is still better than not doing it).

This technology doesn't need to solve global warming. Even if it just buys us some more time, it is fantastic news.

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#237

Post by [deleted] »

cbsmith wrote: post #232
joe_the_user wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks good. I wish their headline was "natural gas from solar power" 'cause many things labeled "carbon neutral" wind-up being conventional petrochemicals plus some worthless "offsets" baloney.

That's basically what this is, minus the "worthless" part. That's the part you'd have to read past the headline to be sure of anyway.

[deleted]

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#238

Post by arrowsmith »

martinald wrote: post #149
tgtweak wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In theory you can use any power source - hydroelectric, geothermal, nuclear, wind - but the benefit to solar is that you can fully utilize it when the sun is shining and store the output (compressed natural gas) for storage, transportation and use off-hours. You could also technically use this as a grid-battery, taking in excess grid energy when it is cheap and converting it into natural gas that can be run back thro…

Yes exactly. In the UK power is becoming increasingly negative in pricing when there is high wind + solar output. This is actually increasingly alarmingly rapidly (and there is 3-5GW of offshore wind, plus loads of utility scale solar coming online). Prices are then very high when wind and solar is low - which happens to be when demand is the highest (cold weather snaps in winter which tend to result in very low wind…

I don't get it, why does it cost billions to turn the wind farms off? Why isn't it free?

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#239

Post by jillesvangurp »

pfdietz wrote: post #14

One can make natural gas from CO2 captured from air and with hydrogen electrolysed form water. But then one has to ask: why not just use hydrogen directly and skip the inefficiency and cost of direct air capture of CO2 and of making methane? If one is dead set on making a carbon-containing synfuel, why methane and not something more storable, like methanol or higher hydrocarbons? Or, why not use the hydrogen to deoxy…

Because the economics of storing and transporting hydrogen are just not great. You need a lot of energy and infrastructure to do it. And while the density per kg is great. The density by volume is absolutely terrible because hydrogen is the smallest and lightest molecule. In liquid and gas form it's nearly 3x the volume of methane (for the same amount of energy). If you are transporting it in compressed gas form (like is common to supply hydrogen vehicles), it's about 18x the volume of diesel. Needless to say, this doesn't scale for things like supplying fuel stations. In liquid form, it's better but we're still talking 3x that of methane and 4-5x that of diesel. And to keep hydrogen liquid, you typically boil some of it off continuously: it doesn't keep for very long. Methane has the same problem except the temperatures and pressures are such that it's not an enormous amount. Liquid hydrogen has to be chilled to a few degrees Kelvin. If you ship it around, you'll lose some non trivial amounts over the whole journey.

Most hydrogen produced today is used onsite to produce something else for this reason. Moving it around just adds cost and complexity.

Terraform seems to have made some progress with hydrolizers. But before people start popping champagne bottles, their synthetic gas still is an order of magnitude more expensive than natural gas. So, the value proposition of replacing one of the cheapest (but dirty) fuels with a clean alternative that is much more expensive is limited. And of course the process of using the captured carbon, releases all of it back to the atmosphere. For most use cases, switching to synthetic gas would push those use cases into the deeply unprofitable region. I.e. you'd be considering many other alternatives before committing to that.

Green hydrogen at the price levels they are citing is ballpark getting to a stage where it could replace grey hydrogen and be worth the extra cost just to clean up existing uses of hydrogen. So, things like fertilizer production and other chemical processes. It's still more expensive but the difference could be bridged with subsidies and incentives.

Re: Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas

#240

Post by yetihehe »

cbsmith wrote: post #236
toddmorey wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but the issue is we almost always encounter & have to remove lots of natural underground methane to get to the oil below it. If the oil drills lose incentive to sell the methane off, they just burn it on site as waste. Horrible I know. So synthetic methane also needs to reduce crude oil demand I’m thinking.

I don't think it does, though that would be great. Burning the methane on site as waste is still significantly better than releasing it into the air (converting methane to mostly CO2 is still better than not doing it). This technology doesn't need to solve global warming. Even if it just buys us some more time, it is fantastic news.

If you could get that methane and use it for something productive, what would you propose? I'm looking for ideas, some process that has relatively easy to transport equipment (no expensive big buildings which have to be demolished when oil field is depleted), energy intensive and makes some valuable product with that energy. If someone has any wild/interesting ideas in this space, I'd like to hear it.
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